Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
For example, one site sells basketball shirts, another sells baseball shirts, another sells football shirts.
Each site only mentions the word of its respective sport.
Yet each site uses the same general layout, coding, and very similar text other than the different sports words.
If I had it to do over again 7 years ago I would have just made 1 site. But it's too late for that...
2 questions:
1) Is it ok for me to put a left menu bar link on each site that links to the other sites using "basketball shirts" & "baseball shirts" in the link text on the football site, and visa versa for the other sites?
2) Is it okay to create a page that says "Sports shirts" on each site that links to the others using the link text mentioned above (but in paragraphs rather than left menu bar) or will that page have too much of the same text since each site will now have a page that says "sports shirts"?
Should I just pick the best site to go with option 2 on, assuming it's even okay to do option 1?
Thanks so much for your opinion.
For example, using rel no follow?
Or am I living in the dark ages thinking interlinking would be penalized? After all, it would be better for site visitors.
I suppose the left bar links could even be graphical in nature, for example, so as to avoid using the word "basketball" on the "football" site which is one of the things that could potentially produce a dup penalty.
Does this make sense?
Thanks
I am a web developer and on one of my pages on our company site, I have many examples of sites that I host. All of these examples have links to their home. Some of these rank relativley high in the SERPS. Some of these sites have "devloped by blah company" with a link going back to our company site. I have never had any problems doing this. But you would think by some of the posts here that interlinking, especially within the same C class is a big no no. Well. I have never really had a problem with it. However... and this is a big however... non of these sites interlink with each other. I don't think I want to try something like that. All the sites are radically different from e-commerce to non-profits. There really is no reason to interlink them just for GPR.
Not sure if this helps or not. If you were interlinking your sites based solely on the convenience of your users, then I think that should play a dominant role in your decision to do so.
Just my opinion.
But you would think by some of the posts here that interlinking, especially within the same C class is a big no no.
Advice can come from a variety of sources who are trying to do a variety of things. Take this theoretcial situation. Someone may be working with a group of "shadow networks" -- say 10 groups with 100 to 300 relatively disposable domains in each -- and they are hoping to stay off Google's radar for a couple of months or so with some loosely designed interlinking. Getting too many domains banned too fast might be a pain the neck, we can imagine.
Such a theoretical person might advise taking interlinking precautions that will not really apply to someone who else is doing quite "vanilla" marketing with just a handful of domains. And their advice was never really intended for some of the people who read it - but still they thought they caught a pass and then tried to run with the ball.
I have never worried about C-class issues, and I have never noticed any problems with interlinking domains that were only loosely related, but occasionally touched in topical areas where some crosslinks made sense for the visitor.
I have links from one to the other because it is a natural thing to do.
All my sites rank well and have for years.
This is only 3 sites.
There may be penalties for more than that?
[edited by: Aforum at 6:22 pm (utc) on Sep. 12, 2006]
